Viewpoints: The Price Of Sovaldi; A Medicaid Compromise For Virginia; The Cadillac Tax

The Wall Street Journal: Price Bomb Of Gilead
Still, [Sens. Ron Wyden and Chuck Grassley] have done a kind of service [with their findings of their 18-month investigation into Gilead Sciences and the drug Sovaldi]. The price-control lobby claims to favor “transparency,” and the 134-page report and in particular the documents in the supporting exhibits provide perhaps the most transparent look ever into pricing decisions in the modern drug business. Far from the gouging of political lore, the report shows Gilead deliberatively and rationally set a price for the therapy sofosbuvir (commercially name Sovaldi) on the basis of “clinical attributes, value determination, market research will payers and the cost of current product regimens.” (12/6)

The Washington Post's Wonkblog: Why The U.S. Should Pay Irish Drug Prices If Pfizer Wants To Pay Irish Tax Rates
Last week, the drug giant Pfizer announced its plan to become an Irish drug company, moving its corporate headquarters abroad as part of a complex business maneuver that would allow it to skirt billions in U.S. taxes. That came on top of more general outrage over the soaring prices of many drugs — made by Pfizer and other companies — which are often many fold higher in America than overseas.‎ Pharmaceutical companies often claim that the profits they earn from high U.S. prices fuels U.S. innovation. But that’s not the whole story. Non-U.S. drug companies also benefit from our high prices, and that would be true for the new Ireland-based Pfizer too. (Dr. Peter Bach, 12/6)

Forbes: Obama Administration: Obamacare Has Driven Health Spending Up, While Covering Fewer Than Expected
For years, we’ve heard from Obamacare’s supporters that the law has been a success, because, they say, it has provided more people with health insurance, and slowed the growth rate of health spending. Well, the returns are in. Last week, the Obama administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released its official estimates of the uninsured population and of health spending. And in 2014, we learned, Obamacare’s coverage expansion fell between 6 and 12 million short of expectations, while driving the growth of health spending to its highest rate in 7 years. (Avik Roy, 12/6)

The Motley Fool: Is Healthcare Going To Bankrupt The Average American Retiree
Sky-high drug prices have been in the news lately, but it's not just drug prices that pose a risk to retiree savings. Health-insurance and long-term care costs are increasing, too, and that has more Americans worrying about their financial security in retirement than ever before. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) office of the actuary, total spending on healthcare in America grew by 5.3% last year -- the fastest increase in five years. The 5.3% increase comes on the heels of a 3.7% increase in 2013, and a 2.9% increase in 2012. (Todd Campbell, 12/6)

The Washington Post: A Win-Win On Health Care In Virginia
Virginia hospitals, especially in those poor and rural areas, have been struggling to manage a financial crunch of their own caused by the GOP’s refusal to expand Medicaid, along with the mandate that they provide free or low-cost care to poor and uninsured patients. Increasingly desperate for federal funding under Obamacare — the same funding the GOP blocked — the hospitals have embraced a tax they’ve long opposed. The tax would be assessed on hospital revenue, which hospitals now say they’d support if the funds yielded were earmarked for health care, thereby drawing down federal matching funds under Medicaid. The hospitals also insist that the state would commit to maintaining its planned subsidies for health care. That’s a win-win proposition. (12/6)

The Washington Post: United Against The ‘Cadillac’ Tax
Current law provides a tax exclusion for employer-paid insurance. This is how nearly half the public gets insurance, but the exclusion subsidizes overutilization of health care, causes “job lock” by linking work and insurance, and redistributes income upward because tax breaks increase in value for higher income brackets. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 34 percent of the benefits go to the top 20 percent of income earners. Repealing the exclusion would have been a progressive way to curb health-care costs and raise revenue for coverage expansion. Taxing high-value plans was a second-best solution that would claw back $87 billion in revenue between 2018 and 2025, according to the CBO. Corporations and labor unions hate the tax, however. (12/6)

Huffington Post: This Could Be The Last Big Anti-Poverty Effort Of Obama's Presidency
President Barack Obama and some of his allies are trying to transform an ugly piece of tax legislation into something that gives critical help to millions of low-income Americans. ... The legislation is a big bundle of tax breaks that could be worth somewhere between $700 billion and $800 billion over the next 10 years, depending on how negotiations go. ... concerns may still cause negotiations to unravel. So could arguments among the bill’s supporters. Congressional Democrats, for example, want the bill to include postponement of the Affordable Care Act’s “Cadillac tax” -- a levy on expensive health insurance policies that economists say helps to hold down health costs, but that is highly unpopular with just about everybody else. The White House opposes that. (Jonathan Cohn, 12/5)

The New York Times: The Unfair Treatment Of Ebola Workers
American health care workers contributed enormously to the successful effort to stop the Ebola epidemic in West Africa that flared up in 2014, but they were treated horrendously when they came home. The reason: Irrational fears and politicians eager to show toughness in protecting constituents led to needless quarantines on doctors, nurses and other workers, even when they had no symptoms of the disease and no chance of infecting others. ... Health experts around the world are assessing the epidemic in West Africa for clues about how to respond to the next outbreak of an infectious disease that could spread to other countries. Health officials in the United States should study our own response to the epidemic. (12/5)

Los Angeles Times: Violence, Intimidation And Hate: What It's Like Working Under Siege At Planned Parenthood
For several years in the 1990s, I worked at a small Planned Parenthood clinic in Kansas. I started as a secretary, became a community sexuality educator and, along the way, helped with the mundane tasks of keeping a health center open. ... Our tormentors weren't always satisfied with phone calls. On more than one occasion they poured butyric acid under the clinic doors and into the ventilation systems, forcing patients to reschedule appointments. For low-income people taking unpaid time off work for medical appointments, it was one more obstacle to receiving care. When a clinic closes, for a day or forever, those are the people who are disproportionately affected. (Bryn Greenwood, 12/4)

Reuters: In The Quest To Prevent Obesity, There’s ‘Womb For Improvement’
Though most people tend to think of obesity as the product of sloth and gluttony, most of us accept as “biological” the fact that fatter parents tend to have fatter children. But the link goes deeper than that. Children can inherit tendencies towards weight gain in the same way that they may have their mother’s nose or father’s chin. Body fatness, response to overfeeding, how efficiently we burn calories, and even our food choices are all very much inherited and all potentially influenced by what happens to us in the roughly nine months before birth. (Michael Rosenbaum, 12/2)

The New York Times: A Defense Of Sugary Soda That Fizzled For Coke
The Coca-Cola Company has finally been shamed into backing away from a research program that sought to deflect attention from the role of sugary soft drinks in the nation’s obesity crisis. The research was conducted by a nonprofit organization Coke helped found to emphasize exercise, not calorie-reduction, as the best way to control obesity. The organization returned a big grant to Coke early this month and announced this week that it was discontinuing operations because of “resource limitations.” Coke also announced the retirement of its chief science and health officer, Dr. Rhona Applebaum, who was involved in the creation of the group, the Global Energy Balance Network. (12/4)